An imaginative reworking of the elegy that focuses on the difficult work of being with the dying.

At the heart of The Cloud Path, celebrated author Melissa Kwasny's seventh collection of poetry, lies the passing of her beloved mother: the caretaking, the hospice protocols, the last breath, the aftermath. Simultaneously, she must also reckon with an array of global crises: environmental decline, the arrival of a pandemic, divisive social tensions. With so much loss building up around her, Kwasny turns to the natural world for guidance, walking paths lined with aspen, snow geese, and prickly pears. "I have come here for their peace and instructions," she writes, listening to the willows, the "slant rhyme of their multi-limbed clatter."

What she finds is a new, more seasoned kind of solace. The Cloud Path glimmers with nature's many lively colors-the "burnt orange" of foxes, "cedar / bark cast in the greenest impasto," white swans intertwined. It also embraces the world's harsher elements-a dark bog's purple stench, a hayfield empty of birds. Witnessing life's constant ebb and flow, the weight of personal and collective grief gradually becomes lighter. The shapes of clouds, cattle bones by the river. "Why not," she asks, "believe it matters?

Evocative and wrenching, The Cloud Path compels us to consider the whole of living and dying. An elegant juxtaposition of personal and planetary loss, these keen and tender poems teach us to see afresh in the lateness of things.

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About the Author

Melissa Kwasny is the author of seven collections of poems, including The Cloud Path, Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today, Pictograph, and The Nine Senses, which contains a set of poems that won the Poetry Society of America's 2008 Cecil Hemly Award. A portion of Pictograph received the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, judged by Ed Roberson. Kwasny is also the author of Earth Recitals: Essays on Image and Vision, and has edited multiple anthologies, including Toward the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry 1800-1950 and, with M.L. Smoker, I Go to the Ruined Place: Contemporary Poems in Defense of Global Human Rights. Widely published in journals and anthologies, her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Boston Review, and The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral. She lives outside of Jefferson City, Montana, in the Elkhorn Mountains.

Reviews

Praise for The Cloud Path

"Expletives and hallelujahs rose from heart to mouth in equal measure as I read these lush, wise poems that grieve both a dead mother and a dying Mother Earth. A meditation on aging in a fragile global moment, Kwasny's The Cloud Path is essential reading for anyone who cares about our planet and its inhabitants, for those enduring loss, for those who value the creaturely as well as the eternal. And for writers, well, this book is a transcendent how-to, a guide and a treasure to read alongside contemporary literary naturalists such as Terry Tempest Williams, Camille Dungy, and Kerri ni Dochartaigh."-Kathy Fagan, author of Bad Hobby

"'Quiet is different than silence, the latter more potent, / more mature,' Melissa Kwasny writes late in this book of expertly managed and captivating poems, the surest of her career. By then we know the subjects of The Cloud Path: the bereavement of a daughter who walks with her mother's memory; the adjustment of a lesbian couple to a country town where 'the villagers, with their upper hand, are dangerous'; and an everyday animism in nature where 'the fact is, consciousness matters; matter knows it.' The thinking is dynamic, oblique, and agile in these poems of deep stillness, of conviction: 'Given my disposition, I will live in one place, / not trembling like the aspen, but swaying / like the heavy spruce, troubled by forces larger than me.' The concerns and grief that stir so many of us move through this poet like she is their instrument. She transmutes their power. 'It is not silence without my lost ones in it.'"-Brian Blanchfield, author of Proxies

"Melissa Kwasny writes the poetry I want to read as the world ends. Complicating the boundaries between love and grief, abundance and scarcity, these stunning poems help us navigate our shared twenty-first century catastrophes. Despite her skepticism (or because of it), Kwasny's 'faith in the intellectual supremacy / of earth' gives her the courage to linger on life's difficult truths. She reports back to us in a sparkling syntax and breathtaking clarity that only deepens our gratitude for what the earth provides, then takes away. 'Redeemed by proximity to these last of religious signs,' Kwasny writes, 'if I believed in priests, I would confess to the pines.'"-Rob Schlegel, author of In the Tree Where the Double Sex Sleeps

Praise for Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today

"Kwasny has a rare lyric intelligence that can illuminate the most complexly layered quest for understanding without attempting to simplify its parts. These poems never shrink from the most intricate and difficult questions that we, as humans, face." Rusty Morrison, author of Whethering and After Urgency
"Kwasny gives us here the book our age most desperately needs not only a book that searches through the self for all the ancestors, all the dead, which makes of violence not despair but threshold to radical repair a book that asks what is the soul. And the soul is no possession. It is instead what we are possessed by and soul isn't one thing, but all things, everything, from the herd of mule-deer wary at our own presence, to the soil that bears the plants that bear the seeds the goldfinches feed on, and yes, the soul is those goldfinches, too." Dan Beachy-Quick, author of The Thinking Root

"I can't shake the feeling that this work is haunted by the spirits of the living earth. Revelatory and resplendent, Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today is an altar to a higher vision, an elegant meditation fastened to both the inconceivable and the conceivable, the immortal and the material world." Debra Magpie Earling, author of Perma Red

Book Information
ISBN 9781639550920
Author Melissa Kwasny
Format Paperback
Page Count 96
Imprint Milkweed Editions
Publisher Milkweed Editions